A group of Australian scientists have revealed that time travel could be mathematically possible.
Time travel has always been seen as the stuff of science fiction.
And no, this isn’t some clickbait title – they mean travel back in time, not forwards like we are literally doing right now…
Einstein was also interested in time travel, but deemed it impossible due to the grandfather paradox.
If you’re not sure what that is, here’s a brief explanation. The grandfather paradox essentially shows that time travel is very messy and wouldn’t work. It demonstrates a man going back in time and killing his grandfather, which would then mean he wasn’t born. Also meaning, if his grandfather died, he shouldn’t be alive to even go back in time to kill his grandfather… see where the problems arise?
But this article is about how time travel could be possible, so let’s see what the Australian researchers have to say.
Germain Tobar, a scientist who led the research, said: “As physicists, we want to understand the universe’s most basic, underlying laws and for years I’ve puzzled on how the science of dynamics can square with Einstein’s predictions.
“Is time travel mathematically possible?”
In their example, they theoretically go back in time and try to kill patient zero of the coronavirus pandemic, in an attempt to stop the outbreak. But as the paradox shows above, once the patient is killed, there is no longer a need to have gone back in time, showing the paradox again. But, these scientists have a different explanation.
He continued: “In the coronavirus patient zero example, you might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would,
“No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you. This would mean that – no matter your actions – the pandemic would occur, giving your younger self the motivation to go back and stop it. Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves to avoid any inconsistency.
“The range of mathematical processes we discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our universe without any paradox.”
A supervisor of the research also said: “The maths checks out – and the results are the stuff of science fiction,” further supporting the claims that history would simply rearrange itself to avoid any changes in present time.
The full paper has been published in the Classical and Quantum Gravity, if you’d like to read it.
